Assuming PHP is working correctly, then this is probably a path problem. Though you can specify a whole URL, assuming "URL fopen wrappers" are enabled (see the documentation), it's much faster to just use the path relative to the current working directory (e.g. where the currently-running PHP script resides). So, if copyright.txt is in the same directory as your page, the following will work fine:

Assuming you have PHP running on your server (you do, don't you?), you have to make sure PHP is actually processing the file. Most servers are set up to only process files with a .php (and sometimes .php3) extension, so if you name your file .htm, none of the PHP is going to get processed.

If you have access to, you can configure your server to parse .htm files as PHP, but it's smarter to just rename the file to .php.

Also I noticed the top image is 89kb, all one image. The site took very long to load on my computer. If your target audience is majorly with broadband internet then there ain't much problem, but otherwise there.

yankees230230 wrote:ok i tried tested the buttons and they come out too..JPEG-12K PNG-4K GIF-4Kand the top bar isJPEG-96K PNG-108K GIF-36K

This is where the "when used correctly" bit comes into play. I took your "Home" button, for example, and used PNG and got it down to 441 bytes (16 colors) without a discernable loss in quality.

Concerning the header image, you should break it up into two images, because while most of it will compress well with PNG, the photograph on the right should use JPEG (at a rather low compression because the background is going to be prone to visible artifacts). I got the left part down to ~15k (though it might need some more tweaking) at 128 colors and the right part down to ~7.6k at 15% compression, for a grand total of ~22.6k.

Mind you, these are only rough optimizations, and Fireworks or Photoshop might do a better or worse job (I use PSP .

yankees230230 wrote:Is there anyway easily to change them all to gif or png in all 40 of the pages without manually going through each page?

How many images do you have? If the navigation is basically the same on every page, you ought to have just a single set of images. It looks like you built it in Fireworks, so it doesn't seem like it should be too difficult to just export the whole lot again all at once.

If you are using the same images on each page then just changing the image will fix it, although you might have to rename your png's to whatever the file type was before, this shouldn't be too much of a problem for the browser as it still sends header information.

So you could have a PNG file - and then rename it to home.gif and you won't have to change any links to the images.

The preload is working on some of the images, but not all.

I got the home image to 341bytes - 8 colour GIF with no obvious compression. This was in Fireworks.

Ack! Just do find-and-replace, man! This is going to bite you in the ass later on.. Dreamweaver has a very nice Find and Replace tool that'll let you change all of those .jpgs into .pngs in one fell swoop.

Ok i did the file extension name change for now and i got it down to a gif 256 colors and its 29k... certainly still not acceptable for you guys... I tried going lower but the dog on the left gets very pixilized. As well as the photo on the right. Anyway here it is... http://www.happydogbehavior.com/html/courses/ 29k is certainly much better than 85 ;) Now i just need to work on the other graphics Please tell me how changin the file extension can screw me later so i am aware...

You could even chop it up into three images -- one PNG for the dog, one PNG for the middle, and one JPEG for the kids. The middle can be really low-color (32 or 64 should do fine), the dog on the left 128 or 256, and the kids on the right, maybe 15% compression (85% quality). This should be pretty trivial to do in Fireworks. If you don't like the "pixellation", just turn off dithering -- dithering is the enemy!

It isn't a problem with functionality (well, that's not entirely true, but for the most part), it's a issue of convention and organization. Will you remember a year from now that those files are GIFs and not JPEGs? What if you hire someone a year from now to work on the web site and they just look at the extension (it's my experience that most graphics programs won't tell you if the extension is wrong unless you do some digging) and save as JPEG instead of GIF? You're back in the same situation you were before. Extensions were implemented in the first place to give humans (not the machines they're using) an idea of what kind of file a particular file is. When it's easy enough to just do a global find-and-replace, why mess with convention and stand the potential of confusing yourself or others or fouling things up a year down the road?

y would i hire someone to work on the site... This is my first site I am bein paid for... I am 14 :wink:... unless i get really good and have to go through an expansion ;) In fall last year i didn't no what photoshop or html or php was... Now I am workin on mysql so i am moving along slowly but surely

Wow, 14. Makes me wish I would have stayed in the house instead of playing basketball.

Ironically, a friend of mine just got paid $175,000 for building a website (took him a whole year to develop this website). Maybe something you want to aspire for yankee.This guy also works with Acclaim and some other companies as a game reviewer. He's one of those guys that stays in the house for hours playing Half-Life.

But I do have many questions, which I will start in a new thread. *Death to thread jacking*

Wow, 14. Makes me wish I would have stayed in the house instead of playing basketball.

Lol... Thats the thing.. i really try to balance my time good... I don't like staying on the computer the whole day... I usually work from 11pm-3am ;) And this year I also got hired by my school to help set up networking. How old is your friend??